In the 1920s, Sand Island Was a Getaway for Young Women to Let Loose

Gert's Getaway

During summers in the 1920s, Gertrude Wellisch and her friends gathered for great escapes. These photos were in albums donated to the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

“Would you folks want these for your collection?”

The inquiry came to the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore headquarters from Kent Olson of Buffalo, Minnesota.

Kent, a frequent visitor to Bayfield, Wisconsin, and the Apostle Islands, had stumbled across a pair of photo albums while browsing at an antique store. Together, they contained nearly 600 photographs, ranging in date from around 1913 through the early 1940s. Some pictures showed Twin Cities scenes and some were travel snapshots, but the largest group depicted summer life on Sand Island.

Suspecting that the photographs might have historic significance, Kent contacted the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore to describe his find and to ask if the albums might be of any value to the park’s collection.

Gert's Getaway

Gertrude “Gert” Wellisch in sailor garb stands by Sand Island Lighthouse, for which she cared for more than 18 summers starting in the 1920s.

The answer was an enthusiastic “Yes!” So Kent, as generous as he was alert, returned to the store and bought the two volumes to donate to the park.

Flipping through the albums, one immediately notices how many of the pages are filled with photos of a young woman and her friends working hard at having fun. They are swimming, boating, hiking and climbing trees on summer afternoons. When daylight fades, they gather by the fireplace, laughing, talking and strumming the ukuleles that were the height of cool in 1922.

And they stay up late; one fireside photo is simply labeled, “3 a.m. and happy.”

The girls – and they would have used that term for themselves – traveled to their island holiday by train and boat, lugging trunks, wearing dresses and cumbersome hats. Photos of the guests arriving in an open boat show them sitting stiffly in city clothes, a jarring contrast to the grizzled fisherman giving them a lift.

Things changed when feet touched Sand Island. First, they ditched the fancy duds. Off went the dresses and every woman climbed into a pair of pants. Trousers were the uniform of the day, along with sturdy boots.

With freedom to move – and no men around to tell them “the right way” to do things – the girls let loose. They chopped wood and climbed on haystacks. They horsed around with farm implements (two laughing women play Clydesdale for the camera). They rested on the shore and gazed at the lake, arms draped around shoulders in casual affection. One sequence shows a hike around the island’s circumference: a rugged, 10-mile trip that would challenge any trekker.

Except for the album’s owner, we don’t know much about these women at all. Penciled labels give modest hints, but almost entirely on a first-name basis. There’s Tina and Jo and Dodie and Minnie – hip names in the flapper era. Some preferred nicknames like “Oscar” and “Huck.”

Names and nicknames are all we know about them … except, of course, about their idea of a good time. That comes through clearly. The photos in the album give a vivid glimpse of just how these young women played and relaxed at their island getaway, far from the outside world, where they could be themselves away from society and its rigid rules.

The albums, it turns out, belonged to a brother and sister, Walton and Gertrude Wellisch – “Bun” and “Gert” to friends – children of Robert Wellisch, a wealthy St. Paul manufacturer. In the early years of the 20th century, the Wellisch family spent several summers on Madeline Island, but found that they felt out of place among the Nebraskans who dominated that community.

In 1913, Robert Wellisch joined with several other Twin Cities businessmen to build an island retreat of their own: the imposing, Adirondack-style West Bay Lodge on Sand Island.

The earliest photos in the albums show this magnificent building under construction. Its stunning appearance is hardly surprising: Among the West Bay Club members was one of the Twin Cities’ best-known architects. Charles Buechner is renowned today for courthouses, department stores and theaters, but the lodge that he designed for his own use is just as grand in its rustic way.

Gert’s album is packed with photographs from the West Bay Lodge, though her time there was relatively brief. In 1922, the West Bay Club dissolved, and her father sold his share to another member. A strong-willed young adult by this time, Gertrude Wellisch was not ready to to say goodbye to Sand Island, and she did something about it. Something imaginative.

On Sand Island’s northern tip stands a lighthouse considered by many to be the most beautiful of the eight Apostle Islands beacons. The Gothic brownstone lighthouse had been a comfortable home for its keeper and his family for some four decades, but when the shipping season opened in 1921, the building sat empty. The keeper was gone, replaced by an automated acetylene lamp that turned on and off with the sun’s rays.

Gertrude Wellisch decided that this empty lighthouse would make a fine summer home.

Gert's Getaway

Gert's Getaway

Gert's Getaway

Gert's Getaway

It took her several years of trying, pulling all the strings she could reach, writing her senator, navigating the Department of Commerce bureaucracy. In 1925, Gert signed her name to paper. The 29-year-old schoolteacher had a lease on the Sand Island lighthouse, for $25 a year plus upkeep.

That “upkeep” part was the challenge. Exposed to the full fury of Lake Superior’s storms, the lighthouse demanded constant work. Photos from Gert’s lighthouse years bear this out: While there’s still plenty of play time, many of the shots show maintenance projects under way. Gert handled much of the work on her own, but friends and her brother Bun pitched in as well. Her German shepherd, Sandy, was always ready with companionship and his own brand of assistance. He rarely left Gert’s side, even when she climbed out on the lighthouse roof to scrub windows or paint.

While Sandy’s contribution is hard to measure, there’s no question of the value that Gert’s hard work had for posterity. Had the lighthouse remained vacant, it would almost certainly have succumbed to the elements. As Gert herself put it, “My living there has kept the place from becoming a ruin.”

Beside their human interest, the lighthouse photos in Gert’s album are precious to historians. They give a look at buildings no longer standing and an open landscape that contrasts sharply with today’s heavily wooded scene. Most exciting to lighthouse buffs is the only known image of the Fresnel lens that once beamed from the tower. Removed in 1933, the elaborate optic long ago vanished without a trace.

Gert spent 18 summers at the lighthouse, but as the 1930s drew to a close, the government raised the rent past the point that a teacher’s salary could bear. Determined to preserve her connection to the island, she bought a parcel at East Bay, 2 miles to the south. The latest photos in the album show construction of a cottage on the tract, sometime around 1942.

The builder was a local carpenter named Clyde Nylen, well-known in the region as an exceptionally gifted artisan. We don’t know whether the design was his or Gert’s, but one thing is for sure: The cottage that Nylen built is a tiny gem. Every element combines to give a sense of proportion and grace, while a floor-to-ceiling window in the living room opens the space to the outdoors in way that would command attention in a house twice its size. Gert called her cottage “Plenty Charm,” an apt name.

With the construction of Plenty Charm, Gert set her anchor for good on Sand Island. She fit well into the tightly knit East Bay community; the Norwegian fishing families accepted the spinster schoolteacher without question. Gert’s personality made it easy. One summer she brought a Model A Ford out to the island and parked it by the dock, leaving the key in the ignition. Anybody needs to haul stuff around, she announced, go ahead and use the car.

The children of East Bay were fond of Gert, who hired them to do chores and paid them well. Ever the schoolteacher, she worried about their education out on the remote island. Before she’d pay them for their work, she’d pull a book from her shelf and have each child read a chapter or two.

The three homes that Gert Wellisch loved still stand on Sand Island. Now part of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, each home still bears her imprint and those of the others who cherished and maintained these buildings in their turn: the Chapple family and the Hulings family, who cared for the lighthouse for several decades after Gert, and the Peters family who still look after the West Bay Lodge.

And Plenty Charm? When Gert died in 1966, she left the cottage to her companion, a teacher like herself. The National Park Service purchased it in the 1970s, using Plenty Charm as a ranger station for a while, then more recently as a base for the park’s “Artist In Residence” program. Today the schoolteacher’s cottage stands empty (though there is talk of restoring it) and her Model A rusts away in the woods, but the spirit of a strong woman named Gertrude Wellisch will never leave Sand Island.

Historian Bob Mackreth, now retired from the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, writes frequently on the history of northern Wisconsin.